Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of todays most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. In this stunning collection, Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect.

Review:

"Every story in this very English collection by New Yorker contributor Hadley (Accidents in the Home) juxtaposes the promise, even magnificence, of a rich inner life against the disappointing banality of everyday existence. In the title story, the author allows a willful girl to fling herself headlong into an ill-advised marriage, then makes us watch as all her pluck, all her potential, slowly dries up. In other stories, the author gives her characters refuge — a fecund greenhouse, the city of Venice, a house remembered from childhood — but ensures that they are not happy there, that each place is dark or rainy or infested with off-putting people. When Hadley sets a story ('In the Country') in the bucolic English countryside on a perfect summer weekend among the members of a loving family, it isn't long before her protagonist imagines being buried alive, 'earth in her mouth and nose and ears... her flesh turning to a dry brown fertilising cake.' Disillusion is Hadley's stock in trade. She is kind to the families she creates — mothers and fathers especially are respected, even revered. But when she dissects them with her sharp instruments of observation, she strikes nerves that can cause pain. Agent: Joy Harris, the Joy Harris Literary Agency." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Synopsis:

"A supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence," (New York Times Book Review), Tessa Hadley is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, including The London Train, a New York Times Notable Book. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hadley returns to the short story form in this brilliant collection, her first since the celebrated Sunstroke and Other Stories. Married Love showcases beautifully her formidable talent for writing domestic fiction that rises about the genre to become literary art.

About the Author

Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, and The London Train, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of two short-story collections, Sunstroke and Married Love, both of which were New York Times Notable Books as well. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker. She lives in London.

"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Every story in this very English collection by New Yorker contributor Hadley (Accidents in the Home) juxtaposes the promise, even magnificence, of a rich inner life against the disappointing banality of everyday existence. In the title story, the author allows a willful girl to fling herself headlong into an ill-advised marriage, then makes us watch as all her pluck, all her potential, slowly dries up. In other stories, the author gives her characters refuge — a fecund greenhouse, the city of Venice, a house remembered from childhood — but ensures that they are not happy there, that each place is dark or rainy or infested with off-putting people. When Hadley sets a story ('In the Country') in the bucolic English countryside on a perfect summer weekend among the members of a loving family, it isn't long before her protagonist imagines being buried alive, 'earth in her mouth and nose and ears... her flesh turning to a dry brown fertilising cake.' Disillusion is Hadley's stock in trade. She is kind to the families she creates — mothers and fathers especially are respected, even revered. But when she dissects them with her sharp instruments of observation, she strikes nerves that can cause pain. Agent: Joy Harris, the Joy Harris Literary Agency." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Synopsis"
by Harper Collins,
"A supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence," (New York Times Book Review), Tessa Hadley is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, including The London Train, a New York Times Notable Book. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hadley returns to the short story form in this brilliant collection, her first since the celebrated Sunstroke and Other Stories. Married Love showcases beautifully her formidable talent for writing domestic fiction that rises about the genre to become literary art.

Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and gifts — here at Powells.com.